10/02/2007 @ 3:24PM

Rocketeers: Taking Flight

At California’s Mojave Airport in July, an explosion killed three and critically injured two. The men were employees of Scaled Composites, the aviation company that in 2004 won the $10 million X-Prize by sending a man to space without government assistance. At the time of the accident, they were testing the fuel system for SpaceShipTwo, an eight-seat spaceship that will take tourists to space for Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. Their deaths are the first related to the privatization of space.

A burgeoning industry was launched 50 years ago today with the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union. Today, the latest incarnation of this industry–one that could radically alter business, science and everything in between–is private spaceflight. And it’s recently gained credibility thanks to some real-world successes. In Rocketeers, journalist Michael Belfiore introduces us to the astronauts, entrepreneurs and engineers propelling the industry.

While Burt Rutan, the aviation pioneer behind Scaled Composites, is the face of private spaceflight, we are quickly reminded that for every winner of a race there are a greater number of tenacious competitors. Rutan’s SpaceShipOne was the first to climb 100 kilometers above the Earth, but many other contestants came close and are still trying.

There is the daVinci Project, an X Prize contender headed by a failed entrepreneur and industrial designer named Brian Feeny. Working in a rented workshop in Toronto, daVinci plans to launch a rocket from a helium balloon. And there is Armadillo Aerospace, a Texas contender run by John Carmack, who designed the “Doom” and “Quake” computer games. Armadillo has developed a working rocket and is still gunning for the stars.

Private space flight is for the time being an exclusively American pursuit, which is a happy thing for Belfiore. While the governments of China, Russia and the European Union establish ever-widening presences in space, NASA is today mired in the seemingly intractable morass of its own bureaucracy. Time and time again, Belfiore chronicles NASA’s inefficiency.

Beholden to aerospace giants and politicians alike, NASA has made a habit of wasting billions while producing nothing. America’s only hope, Belfiore believes, lies in the pluck and vision of its entrepreneurs. “The United States is falling behind the rest of the world in space,” he writes. “If this country has any chance at all to catch up, it’ll be the private sector that does the job.”

Perhaps no character in Rocketeers better personifies this blend of patriotism, wealth and weirdness than Robert Bigelow, who made a fortune founding Budget Suites of America. A Las Vegas recluse often compared to Howard Hughes, Bigelow believes in aliens and UFOs. Yet his company, Bigelow Aerospace, is steadily advancing his scheme to put an inflatable hotel into orbit, with rooms renting for $20 million a month.

Harebrained as his plan sounds, Bigelow is tantalizingly close to realizing his dream. A scaled-down version of his proposed hotel is already in orbit, beaming down data and images to Earth. Given the pace of innovation, his dream doesn’t seem unrealizable.

That this story is still unfolding makes it especially exciting to read. These men are still in their workshops, tinkering their way into orbit. Real money is pouring into the industry too. New Mexico has invested $225 million to build a spaceport near the dusty town of Truth or Consequences. NASA, in a rare moment of limber thinking, is sponsoring dumping some of its spare millions into the private sector through a series of prizes. Throughout, Belfiore’s writing is lucid and energetic, and his passion for all things space-related makes even technical discussions of aerodynamics easy reading.

For the time being, Rutan and his team are the ones to watch. They have the backing, with money from Branson and
Microsoft
co-founder Paul Allen, and they have already proved they can get beyond the atmosphere with SpaceShipOne. Despite last week’s accident, Virgin Galactic looks poised to complete a fleet of SpaceShipTwos that would be the first to regularly deploy to space. Commercial flights could begin as early as 2009.

Belfiore leaves us with a utopian vision of the near future. In 2034, he predicts, hypersonic travel will get business travelers from Los Angeles to Dubai in a few hours, while the world’s energy crisis will be solved by solar power satellites deployed from affordable private space shuttles. This seems optimistic, but Belfiore is willing to dream alongside the solar system’s entrepreneurs.